Black History Month – February 18, 1931
This past February I did a story on Toni Morrison in celebration of her birthday on February 18, 1931. Monday, August 5, 2019, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison died of complications from pneumonia. Surrounded by family and friends, she passed away peacefully.
In Remembrance: Chloe Anthony Wofford, February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019
Chloe Anthony Wofford was born this day in 1931. Although her real name is not familiar, she is a Pulitzer award winning author, has won a Nobel Prize in Literature and is a professor emeritus at Princeton University. We know her as Toni Morrison. She earned the nickname “Toni” in college and took Morrison as her married name. Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class, African-American family. When Morrison was about two, her family’s landlord set fire to the house they lived in, while they were home, because her parents couldn’t pay the rent. Her family responded to what she called this “bizarre form of evil” by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family’s response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such “monumental crudeness.” In 1949 she enrolled at the historically black Howard University, seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals. She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard for seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.
Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children alone. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 when Morrison was thirty-nine. It did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put the novel on its reading list for its new black-studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales. This is the first book I read by Toni Morrison while attending Morgan State University in Baltimore. I have been a fan ever since. In 1975, Morrison’s second novel Sula (1973), about a friendship between two black women, was nominated for the National Book Award. This was another great book by Morrisson. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national acclaim. The book was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940. Didn’t read this one yet. Tar Baby (1981), was another favorite, in which fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter and mama’s boy.
In 1987 Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, a piece of history that Morrison had discovered. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. Morrison’s novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family. Beloved was a critical success, and a best-seller for 25 weeks. New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is ”so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate.” Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988. Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1996 television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey had selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club. An average of 13 million viewers watched the show’s book club segments. As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison’s earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies. John Young wrote in the African American Review in 2001 that Morrison’s career experienced the boost of the “Oprah Effect, …enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience.
After the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Morrison wrote an essay “Mourning For Whiteness,” published in the November 21, 2016, issue of the New Yorker. In it she argues that white Americans are so afraid of losing privileges afforded them by their race, white voters elected Trump, a candidate supported by the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan, in order to keep the idea of white supremacy alive. You can read the whole essay here. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. She has said she doesn’t think much of modern fiction writers who reference their own lives instead of inventing new material, and she used to tell her creative writing students, “I don’t want to hear about your little life, OK?”
Morrison’s papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University.
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